Fujimori barred from election bid

AP , LIMA

A Fujimori follower carries out a hunger strike in front of the National Jury Elections Office on Tuesday. A special election court rejected former president Alberto Fujimori's bid to run for president in Peru's April 9 election.

PHOTO: EPA

Peru's election board rejected former president Alberto Fujimori's bid to run in April's presidential race -- the reason he had cited for a risky return from exile in Japan that left him jailed and facing extradition in Chile.

"Citizen Alberto Fujimori Fujimori is subject to special disqualification," the National Election Board said on Tuesday in a legal notice published in Peru's official gazette, El Peruano.

The decision was based on a ruling last year by the Constitutional Tribunal, Peru's highest court, that upheld a congressional order barring Fujimori from public office until February 2011.

Fujimori's supporters said they would make a last-ditch appeal to the board to reverse its ruling. The board has final say on who can run in the April 9 race, which looks to be contested by a record-breaking 23 presidential candidates.

Anticipating Fujimori's rejection, an alliance of his political groups registered Congresswoman Martha Chavez, a staunch Fujimori supporter, as a presidential candidate late on Monday, shortly before a midnight deadline.

Fujimori's brother, Santiago Fujimori, and one of his criminal defense lawyers, Rolando Sousa, were registered as her primary and secondary vice-presidential running mates.

Chavez on Tuesday accused the election board of caving in to pressure from the government, which she said had waged a campaign of "persecution" against the 67-year-old former president.

"My candidacy is a strategy, a final effort of `Fujimorismo,' to protect his presence in this electoral process in the face of this broadside and this campaign, foreseen and elaborated by the government and its allies," Chavez told Radioprogramas radio.

Fujimori is fighting efforts by Peruvian prosecutors to have him extradited to face a dozen charges involving human rights abuses and corruption. He arrived unexpectedly in Chile in November.

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